Indie Royale officially hit rock bottom, there is nothing that can't be worse than this bundle. Okay, maybe (nearly) everything Bundle Stars usually offer, but the IR disaster that has been going on for months now might finallly stop...
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Indie Bundle Thread - There's another one?
- Thread starter MRORANGE
- Start date
Indie Royale officially hit rock bottom, there is nothing that can't be worse than this bundle. Okay, maybe (nearly) everything Bundle Stars usually offer, but the IR disaster that has been going on for months now might finallly stop...
Indie Royale actually continues to redefine what rock bottom is. You think they've hit the bottom of the barrel, but alas they find a way to go deeper...
I wonder what happened, they used to have some not so great, but buyable bundles.
Just the rise in competition, I guess. When IR started two years ago it was just Humble Bundle. Now you have Groupees, Indie Gala, Bundle Stars, and many other cheap sellers.
Combine that with the fact that IR's minimum is typically $4, and people don't want to buy an entire bundle for just one or two games that interest them, so they don't.
If IR wants to survive they should adopt a tiered pricing strategy. For example: $1 min for 1-2 games, $3 for a couple more, and $5 for the rest. Something like that.
But overall it just seems like these cheap ass indie games have been devalued to the point where people don't want to pay more than spare change. There are just too many indie games, many of which feel familiar (e.g. retro platformers), and the only bundles that tend to be worth it are Humbles (imo).
New Bundle Starts Sim Bundle
£2.97
Trainz Simulator 12
IL2-Sturmovik: 1946
Euro Truck Simulator
GT Legends
Agricultural Simulator 2011 Extended Ed.
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars
GTR FIA GT Racing
Rig 'n' Roll
Trainz Simulator: Murchison 2
This one seems pretty solid, aren't quite a few of these considered top in their genre?
£2.97
Trainz Simulator 12
IL2-Sturmovik: 1946
Euro Truck Simulator
GT Legends
Agricultural Simulator 2011 Extended Ed.
Air Conflicts: Secret Wars
GTR FIA GT Racing
Rig 'n' Roll
Trainz Simulator: Murchison 2
This one seems pretty solid, aren't quite a few of these considered top in their genre?
When I click to increase my order amount for, say, the PC and Android 7 bundle, a form shows up that's pretty much exactly like the initial order form, with all the different payment options. I assume they don't care if you use a different credit card or even an entirely different payment method.
Thanks, I can't check my account right now. That is good to know.
Doug Heffernan
Member
Do you have a link for this?
Humble Bundle Weekly's Halloween offering is lotsa Worms with Team 17
https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
Lord British
Member
Note that you don't get keys, just click-to-redeem on Steam. Quite irritated, I was going to give a lot of them away.
Wok
Member
These are still individual keys.
After you authorize Humble once, you just have to click once per game.
HadesGigas
Member
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Ultimately I'm not really understanding why reselling is an issue. Is it because the potential for arbitrage is unusually high because bundle discounts are so dramatic and so temporary? Because in theory it's possible to buy a gift copy of any game on Steam on sale and resell it later at a profit by selling it below retail price but above what one paid. Like, Plants vs Zombies is 2.49 right now, I could buy it now and sell for 5.00 a week from now and I'd be making a profit. And this is fairly low risk--the only risk is that profit erodes with time as future sales and general aging/staling of the item lowers values, but that risk exists with bundle arbitrage as well.
I understand that unscrupulous eBay resellers are pretty misleading in how they put up their auctions, but most of the for-profit sales or trading occurring elsewhere are honest. People list that they're selling old Humble Bundle keys or games featured in previous humble bundles. They still get buyers because there's demand for the games at those prices.
In fact I'm not really convinced this actually prevents arbitrageurs, since they'll just buy the bundle as a whole and resell for a profit using the gift function. In cases where you have people buying a bundle and reselling one or two games, it probably actually funds future bundle purchases and is a net win for them.
I assume they've done some economic calculations and have a better sense of this than I do so I'd love to hear what motivated this. In the mean time, the loss of friendly and community-spirit trading is a real strike against the spirit and MO of the HIB from day one, and for most of us part of a pattern of behaviour from the group getting bigger and becoming more of a business and less community-oriented.
I understand that unscrupulous eBay resellers are pretty misleading in how they put up their auctions, but most of the for-profit sales or trading occurring elsewhere are honest. People list that they're selling old Humble Bundle keys or games featured in previous humble bundles. They still get buyers because there's demand for the games at those prices.
In fact I'm not really convinced this actually prevents arbitrageurs, since they'll just buy the bundle as a whole and resell for a profit using the gift function. In cases where you have people buying a bundle and reselling one or two games, it probably actually funds future bundle purchases and is a net win for them.
I assume they've done some economic calculations and have a better sense of this than I do so I'd love to hear what motivated this. In the mean time, the loss of friendly and community-spirit trading is a real strike against the spirit and MO of the HIB from day one, and for most of us part of a pattern of behaviour from the group getting bigger and becoming more of a business and less community-oriented.
Can't you technically give the key to someone else if you can access that person's Steam account or of that person has access to your Humble account? I mean, if that's true at least I can still give the 'keys' to family members or close friends.
Edit: Heck, maybe I'll just put all the extraneous bundle keys to an alt Steam account and use the family sharing feature on that account.
Edit: Heck, maybe I'll just put all the extraneous bundle keys to an alt Steam account and use the family sharing feature on that account.
If I'd known about the new key/activation system when I purchased the bundle earlier, I would've just paid $1 for Superfrog (well, okay, I probably wouldn't have been that cheap about it) and not $6 for the bonuses also. Rare exceptions aside, there's no incentive for me to beat the average with the current system since I can no longer give away the games I already own.
It's still perfectly possible to give away the entire bundle, but one can no longer give away individual games -- the bundle as a whole is tethered to the nominated Steam account as soon as you follow the redeem link on any one of the included titles.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Just to let you know, those "terms" you're referring to are not listed on the page where you buy the product or on the page where you redeem the product and at no point is the user asked to confirm that they agree to the terms of service. Also the terms page was added during Humble Frozenbyte Bundle (after HIB2) and at pretty much the exact same time that the Humble organization took a massive venture capital investment. Surprise!
Second, the 4996 word long (I'm sure you've read it, of course!) terms page is modified on a semi-frequent basis, including 3 days ago, when they clarified the charity component of the service by adding a paragraph about it, without notifying anyone or asking users for consent to the change. Let's not pretend these are publicly posted rules.
Third, all such terms that might apply here do tell you that the user must use the games for "personal and non-commercial use". I grant that non-commercial use is straightforward and not ambiguous, reselling games is clearly against the terms of service. But personal use is not unambiguous and certainly does not imply they can't be given in part or in whole as a gift to other people. In fact the word gift appears zero times in the terms of service and nothing in the terms even governs the use of the gift function. To argue then, that personal use allows for the site's gift function but does not allow for manually regifting individual keys from it strikes me as unsupported from a legal standpoint.
In legal terms, "personal use" unless further defined means "non-commercial use", not "limited to only ever being used by one person". You can feel free to track down US legal cases across a wide variety of fields from tax law to bankruptcy law, and it's not a well-defined word. So if we're going to be overly legalistic, it's in fact not clear that giving away games was against the terms of service.
Fourth and finally, the legalese terms of service are moot anyway because I was talking about the spirit of the service. The spirit of Humble Bundle, and this is evident from the very beginning where after Humble Bundle 1 the organizers put out a survey to pirates asking why they couldn't pay and what they could do to make it even easier for people to participate. It was founded on a community, sharing, mutually helpful, cooperative ethos of helping charities and undiscovered indie games. Remember that the idea for this came from earlier experiments in PWYW pricing by producers in other industries and earlier gaming PWYW experiments like World of Goo. I'm not saying this is an unlimited license to do whatever you want however you want in perpetuity, but yes I think it's appropriate to say that a reasonable person asked to summarize HIB would come to the conclusion that sharing is very much in keeping with the spirit and aims of the service from day one.
It's fine that Humble Inc is now much more of a business with growth-oriented objectives and they're changing their rules to help enable that growth. And it's even reasonable to point out that they still offer a great deal for consumers while helping developers and giving tons to charity. But let's not pretend that this growth and expansion isn't coming at the expense of being a more formal, corporate structure that has ossified a bit and that isn't the same rag-tag band of underdog misfits that made the whole thing a success to begin with by bucking convention.
firehawk12
Subete no aware
I dunno, I think once they made the Weekly Bundles beat an average for the life of the site and the fact that you don't get bonus games unless you beat the average even before they are announced kind of shows they're trying to make the bundles more "valuable" now as a business.
So in summary we're back to one key per bundle.
Starwolf_UK
Member
I'll be interested to see if other indie bundle sites follow. I wonder from Valves perspective how long they will give out unlimited steam keys with no restrictions to developers?
I mean we already see during the Steam sale a few games are cheaper to buy from the developers on their humble stores (I'm guessing they are a cheaper middleman, essentially valve has cut themselves out of the pie) when compared with the sale price on the steam client.
I mean we already see during the Steam sale a few games are cheaper to buy from the developers on their humble stores (I'm guessing they are a cheaper middleman, essentially valve has cut themselves out of the pie) when compared with the sale price on the steam client.
HadesGigas
Member
Like mentioned above you, "one key per bundle" requires Valve to create a special key themselves that unlocks those handful of games. With the weekly deals and increased frequency of the "regular" bundles, that's asking Valve to do that way too often considering they get nothing out of it.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Well, I'm of two minds; On sharing, the move from bundle keys to unique keys encourages sharing, so this is a retrograde of policy. But it's also the case that in many other respects they've become less progressive and more corporate, so in that regard I'm not surprised, just disappointed.
charlequin
Banned
Valve has zero incentive to ever change this policy.
I realized as I was about to respond to this post that this actually also explains the BTA change. My initial reaction to this was "oh, well, that's not the end of the world, next time I'll buy a bundle for myself and a $1 spare and just give away the latter" but then I realized that's not really viable with the dumb new BTA rules
Wouldn't something like this be able to challenged in court on the basis that since their Terms of Service is so hidden and updates without user consent, that people were never given the chance to reject the changes outright and leave the site? I know that every other big company that changes its Terms of Service informs users directly that they have done so and waits for users to agree to it.
The thing is, the Humble Bundle isn't really a service, its a bunch of similar products, so I don't think that kind of thing really matters. You past purchases should still be subject to the terms of service from when your originally bought them.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
Humble Bundle gives refunds on request, so you'd have difficulty establishing how you were harmed.
The_Super_Inframan
"the journey to a thousand games ends with bad rats. ~Lao Tzu" ~Gabe Newell
New Bundle Stars Bundle...
http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/majestic-indie-bundle/
Mount & Blade
Majesty 2 Collection
Hoard Complete
Forge Starter Pack
Crusader Kings Complete
Shelter
Enclave
Rune Classic
Kinights & Merchants
http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/majestic-indie-bundle/
Mount & Blade
Majesty 2 Collection
Hoard Complete
Forge Starter Pack
Crusader Kings Complete
Shelter
Enclave
Rune Classic
Kinights & Merchants
LiquidSolid
Member
Wok
Member
There is a French programmer: Omar Cornut, but okay it might not be enough to get the games featured in the bundle.
Tektonic
Member
All with Steam keys:
The 39 Steps
Lucius
Star Wolves 3 - Civil War
Alien Spidy
Dollar Dash
Colin McRae - Dirt 2
Bang Bang Racing
Hard Reset - Extended Edition
Other steam games to come, currently locked at $4.49.
keys for (how do i quote for???!)
The 39 Steps - 4NXB8-Y3Q0H-DCF5E
Star Wolves 3 - 5KZ7W-FJXYW-EAF6E
The 39 Steps
Lucius
Star Wolves 3 - Civil War
Alien Spidy
Dollar Dash
Colin McRae - Dirt 2
Bang Bang Racing
Hard Reset - Extended Edition
Other steam games to come, currently locked at $4.49.
keys for (how do i quote for???!)
The 39 Steps - 4NXB8-Y3Q0H-DCF5E
Star Wolves 3 - 5KZ7W-FJXYW-EAF6E
spindoctor
Member
If you bought the Nordic Humble Bundle a few weeks ago, you have a Steam key for Neighbors from Hell waiting for you on your bundle page.
Just a reminder for this great Groupee bundle.
Only 80 bundles left until KING'S BOUNTY: WARRIORS OF THE NORTH - VALHALLA EDITION is added to the collection.
Be Mine X game list:
Electronic Super Joy,
Last Knight,
Shelter,
Call of Juarez,
Legends of Dawn,
Face Noir,
Finding Teddy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW2vHzGkkx8
Topic seems to be dying, here are some bundles I have gotten pestered about by emails in the past week. Pinball one is pretty nice.
Humble Mobile 3: https://www.humblebundle.com
Humble "PinballFX2": https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
Indie Royale Sigma Bundle: http://www.indieroyale.com/
Bundle Stars Outer Limits Bundle (Has 9 steam games, nothing that great though): http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/outer-limits-bundle/
Humble Mobile 3: https://www.humblebundle.com
Humble "PinballFX2": https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
Indie Royale Sigma Bundle: http://www.indieroyale.com/
Bundle Stars Outer Limits Bundle (Has 9 steam games, nothing that great though): http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/outer-limits-bundle/